Read Luxe Glamour (The Glamour Series Book 5) Online
Authors: Maggie Marr
Tags: #FIC027020 FICTION / Romance / Contemporary, #FIC027240 FICTION / Romance / New Adult, #FIC044000 FICTION / Contemporary Women
Luxe Glamour (The Glamour Series Book 5)
Maggie Marr
CONTENTS
An Excerpt from
One Night for Love
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The Glamour Series
Hard Glamour
|
Broken Glamour
|
Fast Glamour
Easy Glamour
| Luxe Glamour
This book is dedicated to the people who spend their time
saving our four-legged friends. Thank you, for all you do.
A portion of the proceeds of
Luxe Glamour
will be donated to Best Friends Animal Society and Westside German Shepherd Rescue.
Save Them All
Trick
I stood on the front porch of my small bungalow and looked out at Pawtown. Across the compound volunteers arrived for work. They walked in and out of the administration building signing in and checking their assignments for the day. Dog barks greeted another day. I sipped my coffee. In the east the sun rose. I was lucky. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
For five years, I’d greeted each day with the same prayer. Then I saved four-legged friends in an attempt to save myself. I was proud of the work we did here. I’d never felt better about myself. I was still in recovery but being here, close to nature, and doing this work—work that mattered—made all the difference. I glanced at my watch. Enough coffee. Enough solitude. My day needed to start.
Ten minutes later, I turned the corner toward the red-collar kennel. Late last night we’d received three new dogs. They were littermates who’d been bred to fight, and who’d been regularly beaten by their former owners. These were the unsaveable dogs. The kind of dogs most no-kill shelters didn’t even attempt to rehabilitate. If they were people, they’d be in prison and sitting on death row. But at Pawtown even the most deadly offenders got a second chance.
Two giant red stop signs were bolted on both sides of the wall. They served as a warning to Pawtown volunteers who were not allowed into this area. This was a place only for the Pawtown employees with specialized training.
The dogs in here were killing machines, especially the three dogs that had just arrived. We always tried to get dogs out of the red-collar kennel within the first three weeks, but I wasn’t certain that these three would ever be rehabilitated enough to enter Pawtown’s general population.
I swiped my key card through a strip and unlocked the large metal door—another safety measure for the benefit of our volunteers in case the giant red signs weren’t enough. Yeah, safety was kind of my thing. After years of living on the edge and taking unimaginable risks in my personal life, I now saw life through a different lens.
To get into the kennel itself I had to pass through one more locked metal door. Again, I slid in my key card, turned the doorknob, gave a hard push, and walked inside. The quiet was immediately filled with harsh threatening growls and aggressive barks. The sounds bounced off the concrete walls, creating a cacophony of noise. The cement hallway floor was wet and I realized that Simone must have already cleaned and hosed down the area.
I walked down the hall past the individual kennels. Dogs housed in the red-collar building were not allowed to be together. It was too dangerous. The whole damn situation with red-collar dogs was sad. Dogs were pack animals. They felt best when they were in a group, and these dogs had been so severely beaten and abused that they couldn’t be with other dogs. Some couldn’t be with humans. Many of these dogs really only had themselves. Alone in a world that had shown them only cruelty and abuse.
I stopped at the end of the hall. Here were the final three kennels with our latest arrivals each in their own space: Bull, Domingo, and Rose. According to their owner, who was now looking at prison time, they were littermates that had been brought up together through the fight system. Beaten, whipped, and starved, these animals had led unspeakable lives in their years on this earth.
Domingo paced the front of his cage, in tandem with Bull. They actually eyed each other. Dogs were smart. Was it possible these three were aware of their shared lineage? There seemed to be a connection between these two. I walked past Domingo’s kennel to Rose. She was on the end. She was a gorgeous girl with a black coat and big brown eyes, but you’d be a fool to let her beauty charm you. She was a bitch of a beast. Rose quietly sat behind the bars. I stopped just in front of her kennel. A low growl vibrated in her throat. She didn’t move. She didn’t pace. She sat very, very still. Her nose twitched.
I bent down and my fingertips brushed the cold, damp concrete. We were eye to eye. The growling stopped. Her body tensed. Her gaze locked with mine. She lunged, full on, teeth bared, drool flying, and she latched onto the metal cage with all of her might. Without the bars between us, Rose would have torn off my face and probably severed my jugular. She would have killed me. But that was her job. Killing was what Rose had been trained to do. From the time she was born until the time animal control found her late last night she had been part of a dog-fighting pit outside Barstow. Rose had just killed her thirtieth dog in her infamous career.
Rose was the reason the officers had found the dog-fighting ring. She’d become too famous, too well known, too well followed. Her record had pulled in more and more spectators. She was a stone-cold killer. Her MO was to enter the ring quietly. She didn’t growl or circle or lunge. She hunkered down, ready to make her move. Then, suddenly, she would dart fast and fierce and tear out her opponent’s throat. The whole fight would often last less than a minute. Her opponents rarely survived.
“Girl, you seem pretty mad.” I’d be pissed too if I’d been beaten my whole life, and if I had to fight for my life and my food. If I were her I wouldn’t trust a human either.
She pulled her jaw from the steel bars. Her gaze latched onto me. If not for these bars, that jaw, with 235 pounds of pressure, would be locked onto my neck right now.
“You gonna let Luis work with you today? Or are we going to need to wear you down a bit?” By wearing down I meant running. A lot of running.
Even with her teeth bared and her growls, I’d take this viciousness over humanity any day. With dogs everything was clear. You knew where you stood and why. There was no subterfuge. I stood up. The dogs in the kennel began to bark again. I turned and saw Luis headed toward me a broad smile on his face.